Religion begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us.
 Religion consists of God's question and man's answer.  Religion is not
what man does with his solitariness.  Religion is what man does with
the presence of God.  Irreligion is not opiate but poison.  Our
energies are too abundant to live indifferently.  We are in need of an
endless purpose to absorb our immense power.  We are either the
ministers of the sacred or slaves of evil.

Little does contemporary religion ask of man.  Religion has become
institution, dogma, ritual.  It is no longer an event.  It's acceptance
involves neither risk or strain.  Religion has achieved respectability
by the grace of society.

We define self-reliance and call it faith, shrewdness and call it
wisdom, anthropology and call it ethics, literature and call it bible,
inner security and call it religion, conscience and call it God.
 However nothing counterfeit can last forever.  It is customary to
blame secular science and antirelgious philosophy for the eclipse of
religion in modern society.  It would be more honest to blame religion
for it's own defeats.  Religion declined not because it was refuted,
but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.  When
faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by
habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of
the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain;
when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the
voice of compassion, it's message becomes meaningless.

It is an inherent weakness of religion not to take offense at the
segregation of God, to forget that the true sanctuary has no walls.
 Religion has often suffered from the tendency to become parochial,
self- indulgent, self-seeking; as if the task were not to ennoble human
nature but to enhance the power and beauty of it's institutions or to
enlarge the body of doctrines.  It has often done more to canonize
prejudices than to wrestle for truth; to petrify the sacred than to
sanctify the secular.  Yet the task of religion is to be a challenge to
the stabilization of values.  Religion is not for religion's sake but
for God's sake.